ICAIININO
606
MAMNINO
private letters and journals. In common with the
Tractarian leaders he had from the first taken hold of
great Catholic principles which he found in the writ-
ings of the early Fatners. And in his case the truth
that came home to him with special force, and domi-
nated and moulded his whole life and character was
the abiding presence of the Holy Ghost in the Church
of God . This, it may be said , is at once his leading idea
in his Anglican sermons, his main motive at the time of
his conversion and in the course he took in the Vatican
Council, and it forms the favourite theme in his later
spiritual and theological writings. At first^ like other
Anglican divines, he was able to satisfy hunself that
the Church of England was a part of the one Holv
Catholic Apostolic Church of the Creed, and as such
was guided and quickened by the presence of the Holy
Spirit. For this reason he looked to the Church to
guard and cherish the revealed doctrines committed,
as he supposed, to her care.
His faith in Anglicanism had already been some- what shaken by other doctrinal or historical difficul- ties. It was finally shattered by the Gorham Judg- ment of 1850, when the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council directed the Dean of Arches to institute a clergyman who was accused of holding unorthodox views on the subiect of Baptismal Regeneration. As Newman had said of the Jerusalem Bishopric, this act of the state Church was for Manning the beginning of the end ^\ Even then he did not act with any undue haste, and joined in an attempt to free the Church of England from a compromising association with heresy. His zeal and devotion to the Establishment caused him at this time to be looked up to as the leader of the High Church party as distinguished from the Tracta- rians in the Anglican body. On 23 January, 1847, in reply to Dr. Pusey's lament over Canon MacMullen's conversion he had written to him: "You know how long I have to you expressed my conviction that a false position has been taken up by the Church of England. The direct and certam tendency of what remains of the original movement is to the Roman Church. You know the minds of men about us better than I do. and will therefore know how strong an im- pression the claims of Rome have upon them. ... It IS also clear that they are revising the Reformation; that the doctrine, ritual, and practice of the Church of England t-aken at its best does not suffice them. . . . I say all this not in fault-finding but in sorrow. How to help to heal it I do not presume to say. " Within a few days after the Gorham Judgment (March, 1850) he still clung to the Church of England as a living branch of the Church of Christ, and he was the first to sign a protest calling on the Church to free itself from a heresy imposed on it by the civil power. A bill was in- troduced in the House of Lords to provide that the ul- timate decision as to questions of doctrine should be transferred to the Upper House of Convocation, but was lost by 84 votes to 31, and Manning was driven to consider whether the Church of England could claim to be an unerring guide and teacher of the Faith. He took pains to inform his friends that he was acting with calmness and deliberation. In June, 1850, he wrote from Lavington to his sister, Mrs. Austen: " Let me tell you to believe nothing of me but what comes from me. The world has sent me long ago to Pius IX, but I am still here, and if I may lay my bones under the sod in Lavington Churchyard with a soul clear before God, all the world could not move me." With Wilberforce and Mill he circulated a declaration that the oath of supremacy only obliged the conscience in matters of a civil not of a spiritual kind; it was sent to 17,000 clergymen, but only about 18Ck) signed it. When these efforts failed, and the truth was borne in upon him with irresistible force, his own course was at length clear before him. At Michaelmas in the same year he took steps to resign his living, and on Passion Sunday, 6 April, 1851, together with his friend
J. R, Hope-Scott, Q.C., he was received into the Catho-
lic Church, by Father Brownbill. S.J.
To those who knew the arcndeaoon's zeal in the pastoral office for the salvation of souls, there was no doubt of his call to the sacred ministry. It seemed only a matter of course that his submisdon to the Church should be followed, after the necessary inter- val of preparation, by his ordination to the (!^tholic priesthood. Few coiud have expected that this ordi- nation would come as speedily as it did. CSaidinal Wiseman, recognizing that the circumstances of the case were exceptional, decided to let no time be lost, and Henry Edward Manning was ordained priest by his predecessor in the See of Westminster on Trinity Sunda^^, 14 June, 1851, little more than two montte after ms reception into the Church. There may seem to be a strange irony of fate in this hurried promotioQ of one who was to la^ so much stress on tiie impor- tance of due preparation for the priesthood. But the want of preparation in this case was apparent rather than real. Whether we regard the theological learning or the spiritual holiness of life required of candidates for the priesthood, Manning had already made no little progress in preparation. In his final years at Laving- ton he had made good way in the study of Catholic theology and spiritual literature, and. as Ids journal with its searching self-examination and generous reso- lutions bears witness, the other side of that preparation was in no wise wanting. At the same time, it was cer- tainly desirable that some more systematic training should be added to this self-education. For this rea- son his ordination was followed by a course of sUidies in Rome. These studies, however, were not allowed to prevent that immediate missionary wox^ which had doubtless been one of Cardinal Wiseman's main motives in hastening the ordination of the neophyte. During these years of Roman study. Manning took advantage of the summer vacation to exercise his pastoral office in London, preaching, receiving con- verts into the Church, and hearing confessions at the Jesuit church in Farm Street. In this chureh he had said his first Mass on 16 June, 1851, assisted by P^re de Ravignan.
By a significant coincidence his ordination took place on 14 June, the feast of St. Basil, one of the Fathers who was in a special manner his^ttem.and who has left us a great work 6n the Holy Gnost, and, as he noticed at the time with debgihty the Introit of his first Mass (on the feast of St. Frauds Regis) was the text: **The Spirit of the Lord is upon me; wherefore he hath anomted me. to preach the Gospel to the poor he hath sent me (Luke, iv, 18; Isaias, bci, 1), words that bring before us both his active work for the poor and the devotion to the Holy Ghost, which was, so to say, the soul of all his life and labour. The priestly labours which thus began were continued on a large field and with fresh advantages when, in 1857, he founded at St. Mary of the Angels, Bayswater, the Congregation of the Oblates of St. Charles. This new community of secular priests was in some sort the joint work of Cardinal Wiseman and Manning, for both had independently conceived the idea of a community of this kind, and Manning had studied the life and work of St. Charles in his Andean days at Lavington and had, moreover, visited the Ol^lates at Milan, in 1856, to satisfy himself that their rule could be adapted to the needs of Westminster. In the same year tnat he became superior of this con- gregation another office was laid upon him. At the instigation of Dr. Whitty, who was about to enter the Society of Jesus, he was appointed, by Pius IX, provost of the Westminster Metropolitan Chapter. During the eight years of his tenure of these two offices, the pro- vost and superior accomplished a great amount of work both for the diocese and for his own community, and the eloquence which had made him one of the fore- most Anglican preachers of the time now helped to
